16’Skin on Frame Canoe project.

Well this is what I’ve been up to recently, among many other things of course. A friend of mine has been picking my brains over the last number of years about building a lightweight canoe. Now it wasn’t just a one way thing he’s given me lots of advice about my website. Anyway it was coming up to his fortieth birthday and I guess he felt like adding another ten years to his life by building a wooden boat. So as a birthday present I offered to spend a week helping him build a Snowshoe 16 skin on frame canoe designed by Platt Monfort.She’s ridiculously light but remarkably strong, the ribs are Ash 6mm by 15mm and the Norwegian Fir stringers are just 9mm by 9mm. As you can see we didn’t get her fully finished. We spent the afternoon it would have taken to finish her out sailing to Cape Clear. Another thing we did while building her was set up a time lapse camera so once that’s edited I’ll be posting it here stop by to check it out.

She’ll be used on the River Shannon above Limerick city and the plan is to tow her up stream with a bike and paddle downstream with the bike aboard. Yikes! I hear you say lots of opportunities to puncture the Dacron skin but he’s going to line the “cargo hold” with some closed cell foam mats. I’m looking forward to getting a spin in her some day.

I built on of these in my elementary classroom a few years ago. It’s a beautiful boat, but the skin wasn’t up to the rocky river that I paddle. I used to live on deep water and would would have been ideal in that setting. Good luck.